Blogger and NEWSWEEK Contributor Robert Cox continues to file from the Super Bowl:

At the airport, preparing for the long plane ride out to Phoenix (with a layover in frigid Chicago) I loaded up on the local New York papers as well as sports magazines to get up to speed on the media’s narratives for Super Bowl week. Media Day was Tuesday where the main story appeared to be a reporter in a wedding dress proposing to Tom Brady, Eli Manning and even a few second-stringers. Surprisingly, the Giants were not even the lead story in the New York tabloids--The New York Post and New York Daily News both featured the Mets blockbuster trade for Twins ace Johan Santana. Talk about a tough media town.  You can it even make the front page when you go the Super Bowl.

After reading all the New York papers and national magazines on the plane, then reading and watching the local coverage in Arizona, eight primary narratives emerged:

• Can the Patriots go 19-0?
• Is Tom Brady’s ankle OK?
• Tom Brady as all-around stud
• Are the Giants talking too much about winning the game?
• The coming of age of Eli Manning
• The enigma that is Bill Belichick
• Tom Coughlin’s transformation from Taciturn Terror to Teddy Bear
• The Giants road win streak of 10-0   
  

• The Cost – tickets, hotel rooms, rental cars, events
• TV Ratings – expectations are for a ratings bonanza for Fox
• Parties – the celebrities are arriving and the paparazzi are out in full-force

You could tell when when the New York Post starting calling Patriots quarterback Tom Brady a "girlie-man." You could tell when Mike Celizic vented on MSNBC.com about Boston's lame nickname, "Beantown," the fact that Sinatra never wrote a song about the city and likened Boston to cities like Cleveland, Minneapolis and Sacramento. "Compared to New York, it really is inferior," he wrote. You could tell when the old-timers in New York began trotting out the '50s Yankees and even started counting championships won by the Dodgers and Giants, two teams that fled the city a half century ago, as part of the cumulative proof of New York's unsurpassed and enduring sports legacy.

You could tell that, finally, we here in Boston have New York and its sports fans exactly where we have always dreamed of having them: Celtic green with envy. They desperately envy us our teams--our Patriots, Red Sox and Celtics. That they protest so much is, of course, only proof of how much they care and covet. So I willingly grant New York its championship heritage. It boasts 48 world championships in baseball, football, basketball and hockey compared to Boston's 31 titles, though it is worth noting that those are spread over eight teams not to mention the last century. The most relevant count, though, is championships in the 21st Century: If--hell, make that when--the Patriots win Sunday, that count will stand at Boston 6, New York 0. 

For years, Red Sox fans chanted "Yankees Suck!", a rather pathetic cry in the wilderness because they so obviously didn't. Even worse, Yankees fans didn't really care about our Red Sox, dismissing the team and the town as unworthy of a genuine rivalry. And they were right. But now it's not just the Yankees, but each and every one of their New York teams--the Yankees and Mets, the Jets and Giants, the Knicks, the Rangers, even the Red Bulls--is looking up at ours. And the city's fans can't stomach it. When the New York Post printed "10 reasons to hate Pats", the first one on the list was "So we can give hating the Red Sox the winter off." Just like Sacramento, huh?

You can tell how much all of New York City--with its great sports history, its extraordinary restaurants and its vibrant, cultural scene--just wants to start chanting, from the Battery to the Bronx: "Boston sucks!"

NEWSWEEK Contributor Robert Cox files this report from the Super Bowl:
 

...I will be totally stoked to be in Arizona for the big game.

Early tomorrow morning I board a plane bound for Sky Harbor Airport and a week of fun and sun in the Grand Canyon State where Tom Brady and his juggernaut New England Patriots offense is expected to smash open another gaping hole--this one in the New York Giants secondary. We’ll see. The Giants are on a roll, playing like the old Parcells teams over the past month, and if they gave a darn about meeting expectations their season would have ended in Florida three weeks ago.

I have to admit that last summer, when I accepted an invitation to attend the Super Bowl, it never occurred to me as a lifelong Giants fan that my team would actually be playing in the game. So it was with absolute and unmitigated joy that I watched spellbound as yet another Lawrence Tynes field goal try first sailed aimlessly into the frigid Wisconsin night and then just as quickly righted itself and veered towards the center of the uprights, sending the Giants on one more miraculous road trip.

Still I’m worried. All throughout their improbable play-off run, the Giants have been like my guilty little secret. Now the secret is out: The Giants are a very good football team.  No one among the legion of football analysts and talking heads on the cable sports networks gave the Giants the slightest chance to win the NFC Championship. Even the most loyal of Giants fans would be lying if they told you they expected the Giants to be playing this weekend. They were picked to lose in Tampa Bay, lose in Dallas and lose in Green Bay. At each stop I’ve wondered, “Could it be that the Giants could somehow put together a streak and be there when I get to Glendale?”--and then pushed that thought right out of my mind as being utterly absurd. And yet, here we are.

The cherry on top was being offered the opportunity to contribute to Mark Starr’s blog over the next few days here at Newsweek.com. As the President of the Media Bloggers Association, I've been working with the folks at Newsweek for several months developing The Ruckus, a political blog covering the Presidential campaign.  Since I was going anyway, I offered to contribute to Newsweek.com's coverage of the big game and to my great pleasure they agreed. Mark is an experienced reporter who has been covering major sporting events for years so I am not even going to pretend I am “covering” the Super Bowl the way a guy like Mark can. What I can do is share my experiences with the overall spectacle of the Super Bowl from a fan’s perspective. I am going to do my best to get around town, attend various events, talk to fans and--if possible--current and former players as well as some of the other myriad celebrities and overall interesting folks who attend an event like the Super Bowl.

This will be my fourth--and third with the Giants. I was at Pasadena when the Giants won their first championship behind Phil Simms. I was in San Diego when John Elway led the Broncos in a huge upset over Brett Favre’s Packers. And, sadly, I was in Tampa when the Giants had their heads handed to them by Ray Lewis and the Baltimore Ravens. At those Super Bowls I met people like Warren Moon, Marv Levy, Chris Berman, Marty Schottenheimer, Chris O’Donnell (the actor), Denny Hastert (the then-Speaker of the House), John Fox, Sean Peyton, Bart Starr, Lester Hayes, Merlin Olson, Daryl Strawberry and many others. There are so many interesting people at this game that it is less like a sporting event and more like some psychedelic "happening" from the Summer of Love - even some of the bands performing are the same.

You just never know who you are going to bump into during a week like this and I plan on being ready so I’ve got my Nikon D-80 camera, my Apple Powerbook, iPhone and a letter from Newsweek saying I really am covering the Super Bowl for them. Cool!

More importantly, I’ve got my official NFC Champions Locker Room Hat, my Giants flag for the car and, since it can get cold at night in the desert, my blue and red Giants flannel pajamas which always bring good luck for the G-Men.  Next stop, Phoenix baby! Super Bowl XLII here I come.

There's no doubt that there is a significant point-spread factor in the growing conviction that New York is going to make a game of it Sunday against New England and quite possibly pull of a giant upset. During the first half of the season, the Pats were every bit as perfect against the spread as they were against the opposition. But over the second half of the regular season, it was a slightly different story. The Pats still won all the games, but they had to come from behind four separate times in the fourth quarter and the team covered the spread just twice. Moreover, it has failed to cover in either of the two playoff games. Despite that iffy performance for bettors of late, the Pats, a team that eked out a three-point victory over the Giants last month, have once again been established as a huge favorite--12 points in Super Bowl XLII.

It is the psychology of those recent point-spread shortfalls that has fed the notion that the Pats could be ripe for the picking. Never mind that the second-half spreads were seriously inflated by unsophisticated bettors leaping on the Patriots bandwagon. The betting result has pretty much obscured what the Pats accomplished in their two playoff games. They defeated two very good and very hot teams, Jacksonville and San Diego, in totally different fashion--one with a precision--indeed record-breaking--short passing game, the other with a smashmouth running attack. And though the Pats were challenged early in each game by strong performances by young quarterbacks, neither victory seemed in doubt by the fourth quarter and the Pats won both games by comfortable, two-score margins. Yet somehow the failure to cover made those victories seem disappointing rather than dominant or daunting.

The other nervous-making factor, especially for Patriots fans, is that they, of course, remember: the Pats were the last Super Bowl team to come in as a double-digit underdog, 14 points to St. Louis in 2002, before the Super Bowl XXXVI upset that launched the New England dynasty. And the previous time before that, in 1998, defending champion Green Bay was a 12-point favorite before losing to John Elway's Denver Broncos 31-24.

Rather remarkably, this will be the 14th time in 42 Super Bowls--fully one-third of them--that there has been a double-digit favorite. The first four games, back before the contests were yet "Super" and were simply called the AFL-NFL World Championship Games, all featured double-digit spreads in favor of the long-established National Football League champ. In the first two, the Packers walloped the AFL's Kansas City and Oakland, by huge margins. But in the final two years before the two leagues merged, bettors failed to grasp that the AFL had caught up and maybe even surpassed the stodgier NFL. First Joe Namath's New York Jets stunned the Baltimore Colts, regarded as a juggernaut, 16-7. A year later Len Dawson and the Kansas City Chiefs kicked the Minnesota Vikings 23-7.

Despite those notable upsets, more double-digit favorites have won and covered the spread to boot than bombed in the Super Bowl. In those 13 Super Bowls with a spread of at least 10 points, the favorite boasts a 9-4 record in the games and is 7-5-1 against the spread.

The year 1994 doesn't seem all that long ago, at least that is until you start to recall the details. Take for example the sports landscape. Michael Jordan had retired--for the first time--and was still pursuing a baseball career. Roger Maris remamined the single-season home-run king--and would be for another four years. Bill Parcells was licking his wounds after going 5-11 in his first season with the New England Patriots.And Tiger Woods would become the youngest player ever to win the U.S. Amateur Championship.

The biggest sports story of that year, however, involved none of those sports that dominate the headlines these days. Fourteen years ago this month, I was in Detroit for the U.S. Figure Skating championships, where the team would be selected for the '94 Lillehammer Olympics. I had just come from breakfast with some fellow Bostonians, Nancy Kerrigan's parents, and was settling into the press room in the bowels of Cobo Hall when the most remarkable rumor swept the room: Kerrigan, American's reigning figure skating queen, had been knee-capped with a baseball bat. Given the bizarre events that have unfolded in the sports world of late--Marion Jones headed to jail, Barry Bonds under indictment, Roger Clemens to face Congress--it's hard to convey just how unfathomable the assault seemed back then. Kerrigan's wounded question--"Why me? Why, why, why?--captured the bewilderment all of us felt. At least momentarily. In truth, it was only a few minutes before you began to hear the name Tonya Harding, the bad seed of figure skating, on every reporter's lips.

It was never proved that Harding, a former national champion whose career was fading, had any direct role in the attack. But her former husband and a couple of her cronies were later convicted of various roles in the assault. My life was consumed by Tonya and Nancy. Newsweek did four covers--count 'em four--on the bizarre events. The layering of a tabloid rivalry over the "pristine" Olympics made the figure skating competition in Norway one of the most viewed TV sports events in history. And the sport, which had never been more than a quadrennial fascination in this country, took off. The airwaves were filled with figure skating competitions, real and contrived, as people who didn't know an axel from a lutz discovered that the sport was, besides pretty to watch, one of the great ongoing soap operas.

Figs fatigue had already begun to set in by the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City. And it was there that the sport imploded. One of the most stunnning competitions in the history of Olympic figure skating, Sarah Hughes' golden upset of teammate Michelle Kwan and Russia's Irina Slutskaya, was overshadowed by a cheating scandal in the judging of the pairs event. Nobody who truly understood the sport ever figured the judging was completely on the up-and-up, kind of like our view of boxing. Indeed, if you go back and watch the ladies competition in 1994, you may find Oksana Baiul to be the far more engaging skater, but you're still hard-pressed to explain how her technically limited routine earned her the gold over Kerrigan. Except that the Soviet bloc, which no longer existed in the real world, still ruled figure skating.

Anyway, as we've discovered in a host of painful ways in a host of places, reform doesn't necessarily make things better. In figure skating they threw out the old familiar scoring system--with its easily understood notion of the perfect 6.0--and replaced it with a complex formula that nobody beyond the insiders understood. And worse, the judges were shielded from fans' wrath by anonymity. With a points system with values assigned to every step, twirl and jump, the skaters were almost for forced into lockstep and, while the faces might be different, the routines seemed numbingly the same. And rather swiftly, the sport faded from any prominent place in the American consciousness, almost completely off TV and relegated to the agate type on sports pages. The Champions on Ice tour that once filled and thrilled arenas across the country is on hiatus. And ABC, after years of coverage, dumped the national championships. NBC swooped in and picked them up under a profit-sharing agreement that means the Olympic network paid nothing for the rights.

Still, NBC is giving the 2008 national championships from St. Paul the prime-time treatment this weekend and, asbsent meaningful football, it might be worth a look--especially, as always, our ladies. About the only name you might recognize is Kimmie Meissner, who is the reigning national champ and has a world championship gold on her resume. She is also the ancient warrior at 18 years of age. And itt is the new kids on the block of ice--my pal John Powers at the Boston Globe dubbed this competition "the attack of the giant 4-footers"--that has attracted most of the attention. Last year three American kids---Caroline Zhang, now 14, Mirai Nagasu now 15, and Ashley Wagner, now 16--gave the U.S. its first-ever sweep of the medals at the world juniors. Throw in 15-year-old Rachael Flatt and America has an exciting roster of young skaters pointed toward the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver.

I know we've all sworn off the figs and I'm pretty sure nobody is going to get whacked with a baseball bat this time around. Still, with no football option worth mentioning, the Saturday night ladies final could be worth a peek.

As a New England Patriots fan, I am less than thrilled to see pictures of a gimpy Tom Brady in New York's West Village with a walking cast on his right foot. On the other hand, given how the Patriots shroud everything, particularly their injuries, in secrecy, it's hard to imagine that the teams would allow Brady to wander around enemy territory--schlepping a potted plant and navigating the stairs at the apartment house of his girlfriend, Giselle Bundchen--if the injury were truly serious and threatened his Super Bowl status. In that case, he would be behind close doors, off his foot with non-stop therapy at his disposal while Boston's finest physicians contemplated some kind of miracle surgical procedure a la the stitch job that allowed Curt Schilling to pitch--the famed "bloody sock" game--in the 2004 A.L. Championship against the Yankees.

About the only certainty regarding his injury is that all subsequent information on it will be at best dubious and more likely spurious. Still, inevitably, the saga of Brady's foot (and Bundchen) is far more interesting than the rest of the standard journalistic overkill to which we will be subjected for the next 12 days: the offensive lineman whose second cousin once removed is in Baghdad; the defensive back whose grandmother is, at 83, going for a college degree; the running back who dreamed of being a jock until he grew four inches and put on 40 pounds his freshman year of high school.

On the other hand, if Brady, who has started 124 consecutive games for the Patriots since Drew Bledsoe was injured in the second game of the 2001 season, is seriously injured and unable to go in Glendale on Feb. 3, it would result one of the most remarkable quarterback stories in Super Bowl history. Who could envision the circumstances in which the Super Bowl would be the first start for a quarterback since high school? That would be exactly the situation for Matt Cassel, who has thrown a grand total of 39 passes in three seasons as a backup to Brady. That meagre number happens to be six more passes than he threw in four years at USC, where he backed up a pair of Heisman Trophy winners, Carson Palmer and Matt Leinart.

Our few glimpses of Cassel here have not inspired great confidence. A tall, nimble quarterback, he looks more dangerous running the ball than passing it. He relieved Brady in an early-season romp over Miami, promptly threw an interception and didn't return to the game. His most memorable appearance was in relief of Brady in the final, meaningless game of the 2005 season. Cassel went 11 for 20 for 168 yards and two TDS, the last coming on the final play of the game to bring the Pats within a two-point conversion of tying the Dolphins. He then showed he could follow orders. The Pats clearly had no taste for the tie and overtime and Cassel's pass for the conversion went about 30 yards over the receiver's head. He then showed he could follow the company line, when he insisted that the pass had slipped.

Remarkably, the biggest game Cassell has ever played in to date was not even a football game. Back in 1994 his Northridge, California baseball team reached the finals of the Little League World Series--and lost to Maracaibo, Venezuela

My hometown of Boston has long been viewed as an unwelcoming city for black athletes. And while nobody doubts that, at least on the surface, things have changed for the better here--witness the city's embrace of black athletes from David Ortiz to Kevin Garnett to Randy Moss--that ugly reputation still hovers, as was noted in a recent article in Boston Magazine.

Much can be attributed to demographics; for a major American city, Boston has one of the smaller African-American populations and the suburbs are among the least integrated in the nation. Much can be attributed to the city's bruising busing chapter, though as the late journalist Tony Lukas demonstrated brilliantly in his Pulitzer-Prize winning history, "Common Ground," that giant blemish was as much about class warfare as it was about race. And much can be attributed to the Red Sox, which for generations operated under the most unenlightened management team in sports--a blight that damaged the city's reputation and might explain, more than anything to do with Babe Ruth, the team's long championship drought.

When the subject of Boston sports and race is resurrected, as it is quite often here, we fans hear about a lot of ancients sins and misdeeds, how Jackie Robinson was given a tryout and passed on, how the Red Sox were the very last team to sign a black player, how the Sox frequented a whites-only club during spring training, how the great Celtics star, Bill Russell, was made to feel unwelcome in his suburban home, how the Celtics of the '80s boasted a disproportionate number of white players (though it's hard to argue with championships and players of the calibre of Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, Bill Walton, Scott Wedman, Danny Ainge and Jerry Sichting) and assorted other anecdotes that suggest Fenway Park and Boston Garden (and the succeeding arenas) have never been particularly comfortable places for black players or for black fans.

Those who love Boston and its teams and hate that reputation will point to the Celtics, which not only drafted the first black player, but boasted the first black starting five and the first black coach (Russell) of any major pro sports team as well as, perhaps more important, the first team to name a second black coach (Tom Sanders) and then a third black coach (K.C.Jones). Nobody talks much about the NHL Bruins, though they truly were a major force here for much of my life, before both the league and the team became an afterthought. But here's something worth talking about. Today marks the 50th anniversary of the debut of the first black player in the NHL, Willie O'Ree, who suited up with the Bruins for parts of two seasons.

That historic distinction obscures what was far more remarkable about O'Ree, that he had almost zero vision in one eye and managed to keep it a secret to maintain his career. Fifty years later, it may not seem like such a big deal that the Bruins integrated the league, coming as it did some a dozen years after Jackie Robinson and well after the NFL and the NBA. But while Robinson's arrival would signal a major change and other black players soon followed him into Major League Baseball, that wasn't the case in hockey. It would be another 16 years after O'Ree's debut before another black player skated in the NHL. O'Ree's story doesn't mitigate the city's many sins, but it is little known and worthy of recognition.

I certainly had my suspicions of Marion Jones long before she was ensnared in the BALCO scandal and ultimately exposed as a drug cheat. Given that she and her former husband, shotputter C.J. Hunter, lived and trained together, it was hard to accept that he was taking performance-enhancing drugs, as was revealed during the same 2000 Sydney Olympics where she was the number one American star, while she remained squeaky clean.

And I certainly gave her more benefit of the doubt regarding doping than I have Barry Bonds or Roger Clemens. I had my reasons. Not all of them were particularly good. Athletes don't always embrace reporters so we are suckers for a little kindness--and Jones was unfailingly nice and gracious to me over several extended encounters. And it doesn't hurt, at least with some of us guys, when the kindness comes with a smile and a pretty face. And hers is a very pretty face. By dubbing Jones and Hunter "Beauty and the Beast," we in the press were essentially casting her in a heroine's role.

After her Olympic glories and after Hunter was gone from her life, Jones and her new boyfriend, sprinter Tim Montgomery, were implicated in the BALCO scandal. At a particularly difficult time, the two were scheduled to fly to New York from North Carolina to meet with a gather of Olympic media. Montgomery called in sick, but Jones came alone. We reporters are suckers for a stand-up gal and she stood there and denied--with every fibre in her being--that she had ever used peformance-enhancing drugs.

It was a great performance, a helluva con. But for all my confessed weaknesses here, none of this was enough to convince me that she was clean. The real reason I was willing to believe her--or at least give her that benefit of the doubt--was that she didn't fit my profile of the drug cheat: the sprinter like Kelly White or the swimmer like Michelle Smith who suddenly blossom in late career, delivering far better performances than any they had in their prime years. Jones, by contrast, had been a dominant superstar from the get-go, setting national records as a California schoolgirl and finishing fourth in the 200 meters at the national championships back when she was just a high-school sophomore. Her career had never flagged and she was still in her prime. In other words, as naive as this may sound (and it sounds very naive now), she didn't seem to need drugs.

Yet there was this one blip on the radar way back in 1992. Jones was just 17 when she missed a drug test, which in the universe of track and field is treated exactly the same as a failed a drug test. Jones claimed she never got the notification. Attorney Johnnie Cochran rode to the rescue and eventually got the matter dismissed, attributing the mistake to a misplaced notice in her coach's office. In retrospect, of course, since drugs were already widespread in competition, especially in California, one has to wonder if Jones' had begun her cheating ways at an early age.

We may never know. And maybe the truth doesn't matter any more, at least not today after Jones was sentenced to six months in prison for lying to federal investigators--both about drugs and a check fraud scheme. The denials are all behind her now (and don't forget that Jones, like Clemens, filed a defamation of character lawsuit against one of her accusers). After all, it is an astounding fall from grace.

Still, even as she pled to the charges last fall, Jones wasn't prepared to tell the whole truth. She copped to her crimes and admitted cheating over a limited period of time. But she blamed her coach and even used that preposterous Bonds excuse that she thought she was taking flaxseed oil. We may never know exactly how long Jones has been cheating. But I certainly am ready to believe the worst, as I probably should have been long ago.

An election year is a helpful reminder to sportswriters like me, busy decrying how college football picks a national champion. We should look at how we go about picking a president. Instead of watching another mismatch for the BCS Champonship, as sportswriters did, political reporters were busy last night trying to figure out if Hillary Clinton's glimmer of emotion was genuine--and if so, would it then help or hurt her. That may not make the BCS process any more palatable, but at least it puts it in perspective.

Ohio State didn't embarrass itself, as it did last year. Still, LSU's 38-24 victory did bear a certain resemblance to Florida's in 2007 and revealed the Buckeyes as, most simply, overmatched by another quicker, more dynamic team from the SEC. Hey, I warned the BCS earlier this season that if it hoped to perpetuate its ludicrous system it had to find a way to downgrade the "Not-So-Big" Ten champion, almost always Ohio State these days. The BCS Championship game can't be the inevitable reward for a team that plows through a weak conference (especially toward the bottom) and beats up a few MAC teams for good measure. The inevitable result of this free pass to the Big Ten is a snooze of a title game. And while the game may not have been an embarassment, Ohio State is surely mortified that is is now 0-9 in bowl games against the SEC dating back to the 1978 Sugar Bowl. The Buckeyes have graciously spread it around, losing over that streak to seven different SEC teams. Could Vanderbilt be next?

I've got nothing against the Big Ten. Some of my best friends, including my wife, went to Big Ten schools and one of my favorite cousins, an Ohio State alum, even flew down to Arizona for the game. It's got some great academic institutions, which should mean a lot more in this world than the calibre of its football. But the calibre of its football has become decidedly second rank, certainly lagging behind the SEC and the Pac 10 and probably behind the Big 12 too. Ohio State's loss concluded a 3-5 bowl season for the Big Ten, which is actually an improvement over last year's dismal 2-5 effort. The SEC finished 7-2, the Pac 10 4-2 and the Big 12 5-3. If you check out the Big Ten message boards and websites, they're filled with excuses about the post-season failures, like how poor Michigan State finished eighth in the Big Ten and drew Boston College, runner-up in the ACC. But nobody seems anxious to discount Purdue's bowl victory over mid-major Central Michigan.

This second successive BCS championship and Ohio State dud was compounded by a whole slate of disappointing BCS bowl games, including two routs (USC over Illinois and Georgia over Hawaii) and two other games that were entertaining, but hardly compelling (Kansas over Virginia Tech and West Virginia over Oklahoma). USC, Georgia, West Virginia, Missouri and Kansas fans are left wondering why their two loss seasons (and in Kansas' case, a single loss to powerful Missouri) aren't equal to LSU's claim to the national title. AP voters missed a good chance to signal their disdain for the system when they voted LSU number one.

But a more important message may have been sent by University of Georgia president Michael Adams. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution revealed that Adams, who chairs the NCAA executive committee, has written a letter to NCAA president Myles Brand throwing his support behind an eight-game January playoff, starting with the four major bowls--Orange, Sugar, Fiesta, Rose--as quarterfinals. Adams says his decision to support a playoff didn't stem from disappointment with Georgia's post-season fate--they wound up ranked number two in the A.P. poll--but rather from the string of disappointing games that reflected badly on the process. "I'm just convinced that [the BCS system is] not working and that it's not going to work and it's fundamentally flawed," he told the AJC.

That's something every sportswriter has been saying for years, but it should carry a lot more weight coming from the upper echelons of the NCAA. Meanwhile, as we await the fallout, we can go back to worrying about the Buckeyes showing up in the title game again next year. On that front, there is at least a little good news. Next season, in its third game, neatly tucked between those big home contests against Youngstown State, Ohio University and the Trojans of Troy University, Ohio State will make an excursion west to play the real Trojans, the University of Southern California. If Ohio State still gets to the BCS Championship next year, at least it will have earned the trip.

Roger Clemens has always had a reputation among sportswriters for playing fast and loose with the truth. Will McDonough, the late and legendary Boston Globe sports columnist, called him the "Texas con man" long before Clemens' integrity was called into question on something as major as his alleged use of performance-enhancing drugs. Still, what Clemens said was never exactly what you got, or at the very least was open to question.

When he was in Boston, he took a lot of flak, for example, after being heard complaining about having to carry his own bags, but he later denied ever saying that. Then there was the more important question of why he left the 6th game of the 1986 World Series after seven innings--with the Red Sox ahead of the New York Mets 3-2 (as well as 3 to 2 in games) and on the cusp of their first championship in 68 years. The bullpen collapsed, setting the stage for Bill Buckner's infamous gaffe and a Mets World Series triumph. Red Sox manager John McNamara would later insist that Clemens had asked out with a blister, though Clemens denied it.

When he departed the Red Sox as a free agent, he said his major motivation was being closer to his family in Texas, then signed the biggest money offer--which happened to come from one of the few teams, Toronto, that was further away from Texas than Boston. Two seasons later, he forced his way out of Toronto and on to the Yankees. When he retired from the Yankees, he took the car and the gifts in a moving ceremony--and of course soon unretired to play with Houston, the first of his three non-retirements.

And now we're asked to believe his version of very important events, as offered to Mike Wallace on "60 Minutes" last night. Clemens had the home-field advantage not to mention an interviewer with whom he had a friendly relationship and who, at 89, can no longer bring it or mix up his pitches very effectively. Still, Clemens was not at all convincing. In fact, he came across more as someone aggrieved that his standout career didn't entitle him to the benefit of the doubt from everybody than as a man who could effectively rebut the allegations made by his former trainer, Brian McNamee.

Even though Wallace didn't follow up with the toughest questions, those question were in the air and Clemens didn't really take a swing at them. He didn't explain why, in his initial videotaped statement denying the allegations in the Mitchell Report, he didn't mention those legal injections given him by McNamee that were now at the core of his defense. He didn't explain the medical efficacy of the purported injections of the painkiller lidocaine and the vitamin B-12, which medical experts have questioned. He didn't explain why McNamee would lie about him, except to suggest it was "to stay out of prison", though it appears to be quite the opposite--that McNamee is in jeopardy of going to jail only if he didn't tell the truth. Finally, he had no coherent response to why his close friend and training partner, Andy Pettitte would acknowledge the truth of McNamee's allegation that Pettitte used HGH except to say they are two separate cases though they are anything but that.

I certainly understand Clemens' distress. Overnight, courtesy of the Mitchell Report, he went from being a revered American icon to the mound counterpart to slugger Barry Bonds. Yet with all that is at stake, he never even took the offensive and denounced McNamee a liar. We are left to wonder if that is because McNamee's lawyer threatened a defamation of character lawsuit (UPDATE: Clemens beat him to the punch, filing a defamation suit against McNamee today) and that Clemens could never make that charge stick under oath. And, of course, with Pettite and others under oath too.

Clemens seems to think the public owes him because he was the greatest pitcher of the modern era when how he became the greatest pitcher of the modern era is exactly what is in question now. And his whiff on "60 Minutes" portends an even bumpier time of it for Rocket Roger next week when he is expected to appear--under oath--before a Congressional committee.

The New England Patriots have the weekend off, but nothing seems to slow the debate on the team's place or possible place in NFL history. Bill Belichick leapt one hurdle this week when he was named AP Coach of the Year, an undefeated regular season trumping both the "Videogate" fallout and the almost irresistible urge with this kind of award to bypass the Belichicks, Joe Torres, Phil Jacksons and give it to the coach who did the best job with a team that was expected to stink. (If that were a separate award, Green Bay's Mike McCarthy would have won over Tampa Bay's Jon Gruden and Cleveland's Romeo Crennel.)

It seems obvious to me that if the Patriots run the table in the post-season and win their fourth Super Bowl in seven years, they are unquestionably the "greatest" team in NFL history. To my mind, that is slightly different than the "best" team--better than the Packers, Steelers, Cowboys or 49ers dynastic teams--but I could probably make a pretty good argument for that too. Still, I am amazed how some esteemed members of the football press are unwilling to give the Patriots their due, or in some cases, anything even approaching their due.

I caught up with the opinions of SI's veteran NFL guru Paul Zimmerman on New York's WFAN and was stunned when he suggested that the Patriots probably belonged in the all-time top 15 of NFL teams. Zimmerman's argument: count the Hall-of-Famers. The standard, Zimmerman suggested, was Vince Lombardi's great Green Bay teams in the 60s which has 10 players enshrined or the Chuck Noll Steelers had nine.

I grew up on the Packers and share Zimmerman's reverence for that team. But that was not only an era of fewer teams and fewer playoff games, but one in which the NFL was not yet fully integrated. Both of Green Bay's star running backs, Paul Hornung and Jim Taylor, were white; given that there is not a single white running back playing a prominent role in today's NFL, it is reasonable to suggest that the Packer duo might not be quite as dominant in a broader-based league. Moreover, there was no free agency. So the Green Bay and Pittsburgh stars stuck together. They benefited from the talent that surrounded them as well as from the attention that a dominant team attracts and the mythology that begins to surround it. Sure Herb Adderly was a great cornerback, but how much did it help that he played alongside four other Hall of Famers on that Packers defense? Would Jack Ham still have been the stud if he hadn't spent almost his whole career lining up next to Jack Lambert? Would we remember him today if, after five years in Pittsburgh, he had taken the money and run to squander his talents on those wretched Jets teams of the mid-70s. How much did it help wide receiver John Stallworth to have Lynn Swann wide on the other side? You can bet that today Stallworth would have bolted to be the number one receiver in another team's offense.

From their first title in Super Bowl IX to their fourth in Super Bowl XIV, almost half the Steelers roster--21 out of 48 players--remained intact. Only nine players, or about 15 percent of the current Patriots roster, was with the team when they won their first Super Bowl seven years ago. Clearly, it's harder for modern teams to flood the Hall of Fame. The greater 49ers of Bill Walsh boast only three Hall of Famers (with Jerry Rice still to come) and two of them, Joe Montana and Steve Young, played the same position. Denver's back-to-back Super Bowl champs sent only John Elway to the Hall of Fame.

For the record, that first Patriots champion had only two Hall of Fame locks--Tom Brady and Adam Vinatieri. The current aggregate has two more in Junior Seau and Randy Moss. But might not Ty Law have a better shot at the Hall if he had stuck with the Pats as their shutdown cornerback through these glory years rather than finished his career in relative obscurity first with the Jets and then in Kansas City? Doesn't the man who replaced him, Asante Samuel, have a far better chance for enshrinement if he stays with the powerhouse Patriots rather than, as is likely, leave next year for the highest bidder? And if Richard Seymour, already a five time All-Pro, gets to play his entire career alongside stalwarts like Vince Wilfork and Ty Warren?

The Hall of Fame criterion is sweet sentiment, but ultimate hooey. A team is not definied by a bunch of plaques in Canton, Ohio. The team, as Bill Parcells likes to say, is what its record says it is. And the Patriots record, at least for now, is unprecedented. And unlike the '72 Dolphins, which played a patsy schedule (not one playoff team during the regular season and only two teams with winning records, both 8-6), the Pats beat the two best teams in the league, Indy and Dallas, on the road, and four other playoff teams. They have a tough playoff road--likely Jacksonville or Pittsburgh, then Indy and finally Dallas or Green Bay. If they go all the way, 19-0 would mean the Patriots are the best team ever, and not simply a top 15 also-ran for the honor. In that case, I think Mr. Zimmerman would have to reassess.

Roger Clemens and Mike Wallace once boasted the best fastballs in their respective games. On Sunday we'll see how they match up.

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